Last week Pritesh and I attended the 2010 CIMCIG conference held in London. The event was full of marketing professionals and construction industry experts. It offered a great networking opportunity and the chance to meet influential people with whom we had been talking to on social media sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

A major sign that the industry has come a long way is the fact that the #cimcig10 hashtag on Twitter was more popular that day than news about Gillian McKeith in the jungle. On average there were about 10 individuals tweeting live throughout the event (including us), thereby giving professionals, who were not able to attend the event, exclusive up-to-date insight into the topics being discussed. The overall reach accomplished by the #cimcig10 hashtag was over 54 000 people which is phenomenal and would have been very difficult to achieve without social media.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years re-analysing clients’ web data and measuring the performance of their website(s) against their competitors, business objectives and plans set out for the forth coming year in preparation for the next. Mining through the data to find the insights which will enable me to answer real business questions such as:

“Is my website attracting quality traffic?”

“Are visitors, and in particular Architects, engaging with my website?”

“How many visitors entered my website via my key product pages?”

“Is my website converting traffic into leads?”

“Which sources are performing the best in attracting traffic and then converting?”

“Why do people leave the site from the homepage?”

“Which search terms are performing the best against their rankings in Google?” (Hint: Ranking first in Google does not always produce results)

The new year is quickly approaching and many businesses have already planned their 2011 marketing strategies. However, for those who haven’t yet, this post provides useful tips and guidelines for integrating your online and offline marketing activities to ensure maximum impact and effectiveness. Some companies in the construction industry still keep their offline and online marketing activities separate, leading to confused messages, inconsistency and wasted budgets.Read More